L’ambiente come storia: una rilettura dell’ultimo Muratori

Saverio Muratori’s reflection on the territory can be interpreted in the light of the concept of environment. When the territory is defined as a “global architecture”, material manifestation of a civilisation within its habitat, in parallel, the environment becomes the stable heritage of civilisation. Thus read, environment acquires a prominent role because, in fixing, testing and maintaining the historical changes and transmitting them as the basis and condition of future changes (similar to what happens to a living organism), it becomes the substantial space-time synthesis of a territory. As for the territory, the concept of “operating history” fades away in the search for a virtuous man-environment relationship, that should provide a variety of sustainable settlement patterns. In this framework, any environmental modification programme is not reducible to a predetermined pattern, sincethe environment always offers a set of individual opportunities. But this may happen only as a development of its historical process, from which it cannot be separated since it is conditioned even if not bound by it. a responsible management of territorial environmental heritage management will find solutions, deriving from the past not pre-established neither perhaps ‘genetic’ rules, but rather a history of successful solutions in the balance of man and environment that can provide the basis for new hypotheses of coevolutionary development